Sara Martin
This was actually a pretty good haunted house story that I got for a discount on Kindle. I enjoyed it; I appreciated that fact that the main character was brave and faced the house's demons. And made friends doing it! Nice little twist at the end, too.
Yes, that wasn't much of a review. In a nutshell, a young lady inherits a big house. I think it's England, there was talk of boots instead of trunks and being in hospital, stuff like that. The house is, of course, haunted. She has. . .quite a time. It's not slasher, not gory, again, pretty good.
Well there was some light reading on the bus! Every so often, I need to know where a comma goes when I'm writing. I think I break a lot of rules; however, I am trying. Yes, I read grammar books for fun.
This book is short and sweet. You can tell it was written in 2003. Many of the example sentences talk about Al-Qaida, terrorism, Bush, and Enron. That was a bit bizarre but it was, after all, put out by the AP.
This was a fun read about a teenage prom queen/cheerleader who dies and comes back to haunt her school and finds the only person who can see her is a guy she considered goth and wouldn't give him the time of day when he was alive. This book made me SO glad I am no longer in high school! My high school was nowhere near this brutal.
So, Ghost and Goth end up stuck with each other. The story is light hearted but still manages to delve into serious issues confronting the teenagers in the book. I'm considering reading the second book in the series.
I really enjoyed this YA book. It felt so real. It's much more than a ghost story, it's a story of family, of grief, of friendships and the loss of friendships, of illness, of doing the right thing, of doing the wrong thing. Amid all the drama, there's also a mystery here surrounding the drowning of Perdita.
This gives me stuff to think about. I would have liked this when I was younger, I think.
Ugg. Other than the ending, this was not a good book. At least it was short !
This is the story of an odd little town and two twin brothers who live there. There are four friends who get together and talk in the most pretentious dialogue ever and tell stories no one would ever tell. Nothing real about these people. They were insufferable, the book was insufferable.
I was curious about the lives of the twins, Paul and John, so I kept on reading. I did like the end so the stars bounced from one to two.
A horror novel about an old mansion harboring the soul of its creator artist, Creative Spirit tells the story of a group of artists there on retreat whose souls are desired by the long departed owner. A little bizarre, not terribly scary, I think I was looking for a bit more that never appeared. There were some good scenes, though. I ended with some questions that went unanswered.
An excellent book about growing up in Poland in the 80's. Wioletta grows up on a farm and she seems to have a good childhood, full of running around in the fields, going to church, and being with her family. Its not all sunshine and roses, though, as the title “swallowing mercury” suggests.
Each chapter is a memory, one slice of time, good or bad. The descriptions are vivid, down to the smells. The characters in the village are wonderfully portrayed. And, like most childhood memories, the resolution to to the problems are left hanging. What exactly did the adults do in these cases? Who knows, the memories are those of the young girl, strong and confident or bewildered and confused.
I wanted more and was sad the book was over.
I loved this book and there isn't any review that I could write that could do it justice. I enjoyed getting to know John Steinbeck and his friends. I enjoyed his philosophical dissertations about life. (Although, I will admit, there was one chapter that I did doze through.) Yes, it is interesting that we spend so much money on health care and so much money on war to kill us. Yes, I agree we spend so much on STUFF so that one neurotic generation raises another neurotic generation. It is also interesting that he wrote down these ideas around 1940 and so much of them seemed written in the present time.
I know very little about marine biology so pictures of these sea creatures they collected would really have helped. I love Steinbeck's straight-laced sense of humor that just permeates this book. I also am curious as to what the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) looks like nowadays. It seemed beautiful in this book.
I appreciate the afterword about Ed Ricketts, his marine biologist friend. After reading Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, you gotta love Ed (Doc). That was a good ending to this book.
I had wanted something quick but intriguing at the library and I found this book. This is a story about a woman who is a regular at the Cafe Conde as told by four different people, one of whom is Louki herself. I loved the setting, 1950's Paris, and the reminiscing that the past is gone now, the buildings sold to foreigners and turned into high end shops. (Just like the US!)
There is a sad, dreamy quality about this book, an indie movie kind of film. It was a good translation, judging by the mood of the book. I wanted to be there, just for awhile.
Reading other reviews, I see people equate the lost youth as the ones who frequent the cafe. I saw the lost youth as those who are now older and remembering this Paris.
OMG, is this book boring!
Like, really boring.
Maybe that is a rather illiterate book review but it's an honest one. Kitchen Confidential is so much better but thinking about Anthony Bourdain just makes me too sad right now to even try a comparison.
This book goes into detail about working in the kitchen of a high end restaurant. All the smoking, the cussing, the prep, the hangovers. . .Glad its not my world. I did appreciate the end where the sous chef parties too hard and sits outside, thinking of his career and his girlfriend.
Still, so happy the book is over.
Third in the Nikki Styx series. She's kinda fun, though I still think her disdain of the paranormal makes no logical sense considering she's so involved with helping dead souls and Satan himself follows her around all the time. So Nikki, really? You're rolling your eyes at protection spells?
The whole deal with the devil following her everywhere got old. I wanted more Nikki helping lost souls, less Nikki wanting to get in the Devil's pants. Anyway! This storyline did pick up a bit at the end.
Does anyone else find the stereotyping of the black characters in this book offensive? I'm white and I've been cringing.
I hope the next book is more involved with lost souls, maybe some new characters. I did buy this set so I'm reading all of them. In case you wondered why I keep plugging away at them.
I liked this book, though it took a while to get into the rhythm of it. I love Steinbeck's use of language. The King Athur analogy is interesting, though I didn't always follow it. Is Danny Arthur? Or is Arthur dead? Arthur Morales did die in the Great War, after all. I could re-read this and try to put all that together but I wont.
That was an interesting group of guys in the house. Yes, I am inclined to call them bums but I see Mr. Steinbeck was none too pleased about that in 1937 in an intro to the edition published that year. It was a good story and a different way of looking at the world but not my way and that's okay. Monterey in the 20s and 30s is a fascinating place. Knowing the original readers were much closer in time to this makes me wonder how they received this fairy tale, how much of it resonated with them, instead of my view of “historical fiction”.
The intro in my copy mentioned the discussions of a middle aged white guy writing a story about Paisanos who don't work, who fight, who get drunk. Well, he wrote it in 1935 and I didn't think it was indicative of Mexican Americans in general; I was thinking of depression era people, actually, but that is definitely a topic worth discussing.
I felt it was humorous but a little bittersweet. Very fable like. I understand this book is what put John Steinbeck on the map. It probably would not be as well received today. I do feel like I should tackle one of his larger books.
This book started out like a B movie. A group of people - all stereotypes- go into a haunted forest to hang out and kill time (hah, little pun there) while they wait for the weather to clear on Mr Fuji. Only one Japanese guy in the group and he was unfortunately annoying.
Not sure why the English teachers living in Japan didn't speak Japanese. Heck, I took a year of Japanese and have never been there. (I don't remember much.)
So! I took bets on who would die first.
It was all going well, albeit terribly snail-like slowly, when the book took a sudden, unexpected turn.
What the-??
Not the horror novel I expected or really even wanted. It got weird and not a good weird. I was disappointed.
Off to find a different horror novel. I want ghosts. I expected ghosts!
I really liked this narrative of John Steinbeck's 3 month long trip across America in 1960 to see and talk to Americans. There is so much in here but what strikes me is his honesty about himself. He is oh-so-human and he puts that down in words.
The beginning of the journey is so funny. He is very deadpan so you can miss the funny at times. I had to re-read paragraphs at times just to fully absorb the humor. He comes across as a likeable guy and of course we love Charley.
In the middle of the book, crossing the desert, he seems to sink into a bit of a funk that he never appears to come out of. He waxes philosophical (yes, that's very cliche) as he traverses the Mojave.
Then the end. The South. 1960. Being as I'm not from the South, these are things I have only read about or seen in movies. There's a sense of OMG and sheer horror as he describes his sojourn there.
Three months was a bit too long for a solitary road trip but I'm glad he and Charley went and that he left a record of it. Much food for thought here.
I read this book for a new book group I am going to join soon. They read books about food, not necessarily cookbooks. This is their selection for July.
So my first critique here may not be about the book at all, or even fair as regards the book. This book has very little to do with cooking. This book is primarily about living with a bipolar disorder and struggling with being gay and coming out. I did enjoy this book but I kept wondering, since it is a book club pick dealing with food books, where does the food come into play?
I had never heard of David Leite but I read the bio about him and his contributions to food and cooking via articles and the internet. This is the story of his life. How he documents his mental illness is very interetsing. I can't imagine feeling this way all of my life and trying to explain it to people, even psychologists and psychiatrists. He seems to have had a slew of bad therapists, unfortunately. I'm glad he ends up getting the help that he needs.
Yes, a little bit more about food would have been nice but I'm not sure that was his intent with this book. David was saying “Here I am, flaws and all, this is me. I have a story to tell.” I appreciated that.
I liked this biography a lot. It was very interesting - the story of a Vietnamese girl who came to the United States as an infant and throughout her childhood never found herself at home with either being Vietnamese or American. She tells the story through food - the chapters are themes about food and how she relates her love of junk food and American food and how it applies to the emptiness she often feels inside.
I wish the chapters had been more chronological. She was generally chronological, but not always, and she skipped around some as she pursued some of her food themes. She was 10, then she was 8, then she was maybe 11, then back to being 10. I would have liked more linear progression. I wish she had talked more about high school and college. She wraps up quickly after junior high/middle school. I'm also not sure how old she is now or how she currently feels about her life.
Even with that said, this was a very good picture of life for an immigrant in Grand Rapids in the 1980's and also just life in general in the 1980's. It made me think of my own life in the 70's and what I thought of the food my family ate and what other families ate.
This series isn't too bad. Being from Denver and remembering it way back when, it is interesting. As for the girl Eleanor, she was such a pain she seemed hardly worth all the trouble Janeway took to keeping her safe.
The obsession with the Grayson books - totally over the top but I suppose it could happen. It made for an interesting story.
As for Cliff Janeway, I kinda like him and I kinda don't. Not a guy I'd fall for, I know that.
This one is a book group read, not really my style of book. It wasn't bad, I read it quickly.
I felt this book was about loss and grief and the way people and animals deal with this in their lives. I did not pick up on the theme of the healing power of animals until I read other's comments on the book.
I liked the fact that the narrator has passed away. Books like that are interesting, giving an unusual insight.
Other than that, I don't have much more to comment on. And, no, I don't know the difference between unspoken and unsaid except perhaps in regards to animals who can't speak.
Another fun book I seem to be in the mood for! Nicki has a near death experience and therefore, can see dead people. Admittedly, not too original, but still fun.
There's a few twists here, plus a romance that's not too objectionable. One of the dead that she sees might actually be an evil spirit. I love the voodoo stuff in this book, hokey as it may be.
I'm just hoping that MY heart murmur doesn't give me a heart attack after a dentist visit! I went to the dentist yesterday and then laid in bed and thought about that last night. actually, seeing all those ghosts might be fun. Maybe.
This was an excellent book. I knew nothing about Sarnoff and Armstrong or even the radio industry prior to reading this. The discovery of the technologies is quite a story, not to mention just how old words such as modem and pixel really are.
I was aware of the monopoly that AT&T had on the phone lines, but I was unaware just how vast that monopoly was. I had no idea that we could have had satellite TV in the early 60's if it wasn't for the lawyers and lobbyists of the fat cats, and the corruption in congress and the FCC.
Sad, but I don't think things have changed much.
I am planning on reading more about this. It certainly peaked my interest.